So again, the rules are these: the movie had to be seen, by me, in the theater during the calendar year in question to be considered. It looks like we did a pretty good job of seeing most of the 2007 movies in 2007, so unlike previous years we don’t have a ton of last year’s Oscar movies on this year’s list.

The thing is this – this list is seriously idiosyncratic. The movies that make the list tend to be movies that stick with me. They may not be the movies I recommend most frequently to other people, they may not be the movies I can make the best arguments for why they are good or even exceptional. They may not even be the movies I feel the best about at the moment when I leave the theater. But when at the end of the year I have found myself revisiting a particular movie, performance or even movie moment more than once – that is the kind of film that tends to make this list.

This year, the movie that was probably most affected by this quirk was Rachel Getting Married. I really liked that movie, but we just saw it a couple of days ago. My brain wasn’t able to put it on the list that soon because I can’t separate out if it is near the top because it is the most recent good movie I have seen or because it will still be in that number six months from now.

The full list – WAY down from last year. This is mostly because puppy-having and movie-going do not mix well.